Monday, August 4, 2008

Still trying to freeze them out

Liberal publishing houses and mainstream news media outlets do it, that is--to conservative books, reports City Journal:

"...striking is the example of Syracuse professor Arthur C. Brooks’s Who Really Cares?, which showed that conservatives give a good deal more to charity than liberals do. With a surge of support from conservative media, including prized appearances on Rush Limbaugh’s and Bill O’Reilly’s shows, the book took off. Yet it was almost impossible to find a liberal who knew it existed, since it went unreviewed and unremarked upon by the New York Times and the Washington Post and was never covered on any network news program or NPR. “If we could have had a generalized debate in the culture—if CNN had been willing to cover the subject the way FOX did—the impact could have been so much greater,” says Brooks. “FOX was all over this like a cheap suit. But FOX is behind a firewall.” Meanwhile, Mark Steyn’s best-selling, enormously controversial America Alone similarly went unreviewed by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post."

Read the whole thing. Very enlightening.
But don't be surprised. Historically speaking, this has been the case for decades. When I wrote my biography of National Review senior editor Frank Meyer (still available here, by the way!), a lot of my research had to do with the history of National Review magazine. And it was astonishing to see how, throughout much of NR's first ten years of existence, despite it being the flagship organ of modern American conservatism, it was simply and studiously ignored by most media and intellectual outlets back then (which were of course mainly run by liberals). It's the same thing at work here. On the other hand, as the article also points out, with the advent of Rush Limbaugh and other outlets, conservative thinking and writing cannot be suppressed...